Let’s play Twister, let’s play Risk

Let’s be honest, that last post was a bit shit. Normally, that wouldn’t bother me overly, what with the laziness and the apathy and the futility of human existence and all, but I’ve been thinking about death lately*. Peaches Geldof’s death, to be specific – if you’d asked me a couple of weeks ago, I don’t think I could have told you a single fact about her aside from her dad’s name, but now everyone’s talking about her, and one thing stuck out at me in the reporting around her untimely passing: her final tweet. It was, apparently, a photo of her as a child with her mother. That’s either touching and poignant or massively creepy, given the nature of her mother’s death and the uncertainty around hers – the NZ Herald reported it with all of their usual WE CAN’T CALL IT A SUICIDE UNTIL IT’S BEEN RULED AS ONE, BUT IT WAS TOTALLY SUICIDE, YOU GUYS dogwhistles, although I’m yet to hear an official cause. The point is, if I dropped dead tomorrow, I’d hate for my final online words to be a rushed-out one-sided conversation between me and an imaginary strawman – better put something else up.

…I’m a decaying flesh marionette…

The first time the oldest boy asked me a question that I couldn’t answer was in July of 2012, when he was two and a half. We were driving in the car, when out of nowhere he piped up with “What’s time?” After I’d skilfully avoided steering off the road while my brain temporarily short-circuited, I managed to come up with a vaguely coherent ramble about time being change as we perceive it, which shut him up even if it didn’t actually explain anything. A while later, during his younger brother’s gestation, I managed to deflect “where do babies come from?” as being a bit complicated the one and only time he asked it. And more recently he’s been talking about death, although he’s yet to ask any real questions about it. He seems to get that it’ll happen to him, but I’m not sure if that really means anything to him, though – it wouldn’t have meant anything to me when I was his age.

As noted philosopher The Bad Guy from The Crow tells us: “childhood’s over the minute you know you’re gonna die”. For me that was when I was eight years old. I can still remember it: I was lying in bed on a summer day. At that time of year it didn’t get dark until well after my bedtime, and I was lying awake in the near-daylight thinking about my great-grandparents, when it occurred to me that they were quite old, and would likely die soon. And it followed that eventually my grandparents would too, and then my parents would, and then I would. As a child, that was just intellectual knowledge that didn’t have any real effect on me; obviously, as someone who can no longer credibly claim to even be in my “late-mid thirties”, I now spend every waking instant desperately repressing the knowledge that I’m a decaying flesh marionette careering unstoppably towards decrepitude and oblivion. Which is why I write multiple posts about nostalgia, obsess over hunting down Amiga games from my youth and listen to an iPod whose contents are more emblematic of the 90s than Princess Di crashing her car into a Beanie Baby doing the Macarena.

My great-grandparents are long gone and I have one remaining grandparent. Cancer took two of them; the other died of some TLA’ed degenerative condition whose details I was never clear on, and the one grandmother I have above ground is the kind of tough-as-nails little old lady who appears to be functionally immortal. By the reasoning of my eight-year-old self, the clock hasn’t even started ticking for me, but then you never know.

I guess that’s where blogging comes from, at least in part: the desire to leave something behind that will outlast me – and now that my stuff is out there, floating through warehouses of web servers like a particularly benign and uninteresting phantom, it’s guaranteed that something I write somewhere will one day turn out to be my online Last Words. Of course you often don’t know that your last words will be your last words at the time. You could end up a punchline, like the late Ervin McKinness, or you could be lucky enough to end on a high note. Freddie Mercury’s last recorded words were “I still love you” spoken to the camera at the end of the video for “These are the Days of Our Lives” – that by itself is a legacy I’d be happy with. Best to choose your words carefully, I guess, and think about what you’re leaving behind. Take my latest tweet at time of writing:

The best thing about being a parent? I dunno, but having a genuine reason to use the word “poosplosion” is right up there.